The Defense Department is melding the expertise of the business and technology worlds to embrace electronic commerce as its primary means of transaction. To enable the services and defense agencies to conduct business with private industry more efficiently, the department is working with its contractors to adapt their own best practices and technologies to military requirements.

Just one year after the Defense Department launched its Defense Reform Initiative, information technology is proving to be a vital player in this effort to bring the department into the next millennium. The U.S. military's increasing reliance on information systems for operations and support has opened the door for the commercial sector both to enable change and to benefit from it.

As asymmetric threats to the United States continue to increase in number and expand in complexity, the protection of critical U.S. Intelligence Community and Defense Department information systems is a vital concern for the DIA. In consonance with the vision set forth by Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, USN, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) director, the DIA will have a major role in ensuring that intelligence information is successfully and securely communicated to the warfighter and to decision makers.

The U.S. military must ramp up force transformation without missing a beat in its campaign to win the war on terror, and succeeding in those two endeavors will require close coordination across many disciplines. A variety of issues ranging from advanced system acquisition to personnel training and education must be addressed in the midst of operational activities at home and abroad.

A key U.S. ally is digitizing its command and control architecture to increase the operational speed and agility of its ground forces. Built around a wireless backbone supported by software programmable radios, this system will reduce sensor-to-shooter cycles by streaming real-time data to commanders. Designed for both high- and low-intensity conflict, it will link all echelons from infantry squads up to the division level in a single network.

Members of the joint community are moving forward on proving that voice over Internet protocol can be a force multiplier. Although voice over Internet protocol is still in relative infancy, the Joint Communications Support Element, U.S. Joint Forces Command, has demonstrated through a series of exercises that this approach can increase both technological advances and bandwidth efficiency provided to the joint warfighter. It also decreases airlift requirements, reduces the number of needed personnel and cuts the cost of communications systems by moving from circuit-based to Internet-based networks.

Researchers are demonstrating that good things, in the form of useful amounts of power, can come in small packages. At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, researchers have been able to produce power with a generator approximately the size of a dime. The device, called a microgenerator, is one aspect of a project to create a microengine that weighs less and lasts longer than batteries used by soldiers in the field today.

If throughout your entire professional life you had gone by a nickname associated with one of the towering giants of American literature, what would you do when you finally retired from the corporate world?

As with the U.S. military, Canada is transforming its military to enhance network-centric operations and to improve information security. And, also similar to the United States, the Canadian Forces are counting on their reservists to shore up their ranks in current operations as well as in homeland security. Changes taking place today and plans for the future will align reservists better with their active duty counterparts and increase the expertise they bring to the battlespace. Communication reservists, who are already playing an active role, are likely to see their contributions to national security expand in the near future.

An inconspicuous reserve force is combating terrorism with the powerful weapons of experience and expertise. By combining knowledge gained in the areas of advanced technology with skills acquired through time in the field, these low-profile yet dynamic reservists are arming warfighters in current operations with new as well as improved capabilities. From work on undersea and aerial unmanned vehicles to biological threat detection on surface ships, this relatively small band of technology experts is pursuing a multitude of priority projects in nine focus areas.